There is something wrong about being photographed that has nothing to do with vanity.
Until the Donkey tried to clear The Fence, he thought himself a Deer.
What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?
This poor world, the object of so much insane attachment, we are about to leave; it is but misery, vanity, and folly; a phantom--the very fashion of which "passeth away.
The faults of a man loved or honoured sometimes steal secretly and imperceptibly upon the wise and virtuous, but by injudicious fondness or thoughtless vanity are adopted with design.
Offended vanity is the great separator in social life.
He who wants to educate himself in Chess must evade what is dead in Chess. . . the habit of playing with inferior opponents; the custom of avoiding difficult tasks; the weakness of uncritically taking over variations or rules discovered by others; the vanity which is self-sufficient; the incapacity for admitting mistakes; in brief, everything that leas to standstill or to anarchy.
When we see the bankruptcy, slavery, and vanity of everything else, we can finally say, ‘To die is gain. ’
Men crowd into honorable careers without other vocation than their vanity, or at best their love of fame.
Vanity, I am sensible, is my cardinal vice and cardinal folly; and I am in continual danger, when in company, of being led an ignis fatuus chase by it.
Those Women who boast the Affections of their Admirers, have a greater share of Vanity than Love.
Vanity is a motive of immense potency.
in reference to Persepolis and all palaces, cities and temples of the past: could these wonders have come into being without that suffering? without the overseer's whip, the slave's fear, the ruler's vanity? was not the monumentality of past epochs created by that which is negative and evil in man?
What a strange vanity painting is; it attracts admiration by resembling the original, we do not admire.
Vanity is the quicksand of reason.
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.
Vanity is not half a bad principle, if it will but stick to legitimate business.
Is the artist impelled by spiritual forces, by the divine afflatus, by conscious or unconscious emulation of others? Do angles whisper in the ears of the chosen few, and create for them visions of aethereal beauty? Do landscape painters of genius walk the plains of Heaven? Or is it only vanity that urges him to paint?
All is vanity and everybody's vain. Women are terribly vain. So are men - more so, if possible.
Vanity calculates but poorly on the vanity of others; what a virtue we should distil from frailty, what a world of pain we should save our brethren, if we would suffer our own weakness to be the measure of theirs.